This article reports on the practitioner research conducted by the English participants in a European Co-operation Programme project entitled "Lateral Language Learning." The project was based on the belief that there is much that teachers of a first foreign language can do to prepare their students to access other languages in the…

Whilst formative assessment is now well established as a valuable practice in improving the involvement and attainment of pupils, its specific implementation in particular school subjects has received little attention. This paper sets out to discuss the development of formative assessment practices in the learning of languages. A general…

A credit-rated tandem course unit has been running at the University of Manchester for the past six years and an element of peer assessment has always been present in the assessment procedure. Unfortunately, the course leaders found that this element was not entirely satisfactory. Although there were clear criteria in the course documentation for…

This article presents one part of a wider study which looks at the space afforded to MFL teachers to make decisions about their teaching at the planning stage and in the classroom. The article focuses on the classroom observations which were one of the sources for the collection of rich data. In an attempt to quantify the space available, the…

This article considers the role of language learners in the global society and the extent to which interaction between different language communities can be regarded as possible without intercultural competence. It moves on to review the skills and competencies that can be taught to undergraduates in an attempt to enable them to engage more…

In this review, the author explores various perspectives on language issues in political contexts, not least because languages have been prominent recently on the political agenda both in the UK and the US. She reviews articles that highlight different ways in which political pressures and contexts influence language teaching, learning and use.…

This article focuses on some of the key issues that need to be addressed by 2010 if MLPS in England is going to work. The aims of MLPS need defining as educational, not instrumental; the KS1/2 experience has to be enjoyable and rewarding: an apprenticeship in learning how to learn a language, providing the tools for later learning and raising…

There has been much reflection recently on how language gets used in language classrooms, by language learners and by language teachers. Rather than the perennial debate about target-language use, the author is referring to the growing body of classroom research in the area of linguistics known as pragmatics. Pragmatics, as defined by Crystal…

Literary hypertext has often been acknowledged as the embodiment of poststructuralist literary theory (e.g. Coover, 1992; Landow, 1997; Bolter, 2001). The only literary medium that is produced, edited, published and received electronically, it encourages readings that defy the conventionally linear decoding process. With respect to text…

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study which focused on reading strategy instruction for learners of French or Spanish as a modern foreign language. The objective of the study was to explore the potential of reading strategy instruction in raising the learner readers' awareness of reading strategies, in extending the range of…

The Special Education and Disability Act (SENDA) 2001 required post-16 institutions to have implemented the Disability Discrimination Act Part IV (DDA) 1995 by September 2005. In this paper a lecturer in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) and a specialist teacher of the visually impaired from the Centre for Special and Inclusive Education at a…

People live in a world that is increasingly interconnected, in which distant events can affect them as never before. On both an economic and social level, they are experiencing rapid change. While in the past only a small number of people engaged with the wider world, today the picture is very different. At a social level, if children are to be…

Normal practice in course and text book construction is to provide learners with pre-selected material chosen by the authors to illustrate a pre-determined grammar, content or teaching syllabus. This paper will discuss the effect of the reversal of this process at a pilot workshop session in which learners themselves were invited to select the…

This article argues that drama is an under-exploited resource in the foreign language classroom for promoting intercultural competence and developing an awareness of the interpersonal dimension embedded in the language we use. Drama also offers ample opportunities to explore nuances of the foreign culture as well as conflict situations and…

Paired listening was originally developed as a research tool with the aim to understand the strategies used by L2 learners when listening to recorded speech in the target language. It offers researchers a useful combination of direct observation and verbal data, whilst avoiding the common drawbacks of subjective introspection. This paper examines…